Ajinkya Kulkarni showed up at our office in Pune one day with a fairly simple idea. He wanted to build a liquid fixed income product that could give consumers an attractive return, around 12% at the time. I remember thinking this was interesting because I had been wondering if there was an opportunity to build something like a Yieldstreet for India. The two ideas matched almost immediately, so we started talking. That led to a lot of brainstorming around fixed income, how consumers in India thought about it, what was missing, and how much easier the whole experience could be made. We started calling the vision the Passive Income App of India, and that was really the beginning of what eventually became Wint Wealth. A lot has changed since then, both in the company and in the market, but Wint has really been one of the torchbearers of making fixed income accessible to Indian consumers. They built the product, educated consumers at scale and created what I think is one of the best fixed income experiences in India. But the Wint story is also part of a much broader way we have thought about consumer financial services at Better. When people talk about the Indian consumer, there is often a tendency to talk about hundreds of millions of users as if they are one large market. We have never really looked at it that way. It is a collection of a very large number of consumer segments, each potentially tens of millions of people, that can be quite different from one another. What work they do, how much they earn, how predictable that income is, what they aspire to, how they save, how they invest, and what kind of financial products make sense to them can all be completely different. A gig worker is a very different financial services customer from a young salaried professional. That person is different again from an NRI, a crypto investor, a mass affluent investor or an ultra HNI. And our view was that if these users are so different, why should the financial experience built for each of them look the same? We believed there was an opportunity to build a dramatically better, almost 10x experience for each of these segments. And quite often, we believed these would need to be different companies altogether. The founder DNA required to understand one of these consumers deeply can be very different from another. The product, distribution, trust, partnerships and the way you think about the customer can all be different. We never really believed that you could build one generic financial services company and simply keep adding ten products for ten very different segments underneath it. That thinking informed a lot of our consumer fintech investing. Wint was one expression of it. Fixed income had historically been relatively cumbersome for consumers to discover and invest in. Wint essentially took that experience and rebuilt it around what a modern consumer would want. Gullak came from another direction altogether. Gold is already deeply understood and trusted i
